Monday, September 25, 2006

I am slowly migrating from using 30Boxes as my online calendar to Google Calendar for its tight integration with Gmail. I have accomplished this by feeding my 30Boxes iCal into Google Calendar and using the "copy to my calendar" feature in Google Calendar. In the process, I have found a few shortcomings of Google Calendar.

"copy to my calendar" - The user interface presented for the copying the event does not have an option to specify repeating events. If you are copying repeating events, such as birthdays (which form the bulk of my copied events), then copying the event becomes a 2 step process. 1) Copy the event without any repeating options specified and 2) edit the event to set your repeating pattern.

Quick Add reminders - Google Calendar does not let you specify reminders using the Quick Add feature. I would love to be able to specify

"lunch with joe today 1pm reminder 15minutes"

and have the event created to remind me 15 minutes before my lunch with joe.

RSS feeds - Google Calendar should allow addition of any RSS feeds, such as my Flickr photos, into the calendar. This is useful for sites that publish the weather information as RSS feeds. I have worked around this by using the Weather Underground which publishes weather in the iCal format.

More SMS commands - I like that you can get the next event, the agenda for today, and the agenda for the next day simply by sending an SMS to GVENT, but Google Calendar does not have an SMS command for looking up the agenda for any arbitrary day.